


what if you're someone i just want around?

by sixtywattgloom



Category: The L Word: Generation Q (TV)
Genre: F/F, also the sex? not very explicit but enough to warrant the rating, brief reference to underage drinking, gigi (and me) dunking on College Boyfriend Ted, lots of nat Having Emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22963957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixtywattgloom/pseuds/sixtywattgloom
Summary: Nat isn’t stupid: a friendship rekindled with the girl she fell in love with barely out of her teens—the woman who poured a lifetime’s worth of trust issues over her and lit a match—the mother to her kids, so full of love and compassion and patience it’s always been just a little too hard to look away—the ex-wife who hammered her wedding ring into Nat’s door, like she had any right to betrayal, like that was something she deserved to share—the best friend she ever had—it’s too dangerous a choice to make.or: a series of vignettes about gigi rearranging things that belong to nat, and all of the almosts along the way. nat/gigi-centric, but also alice/nat/gigi.
Relationships: Natalie "Nat" Bailey/Gigi Ghorbani, Natalie "Nat" Bailey/Gigi Ghorbani/Alice Pieszecki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	what if you're someone i just want around?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tatmaslany](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatmaslany/gifts).



> this was borne out of the post-threesome discussion scene, which begins with gigi moving (returning?) the bowl of oranges to the island in the kitchen, and just kind of grew its own legs and ran away with me from there. also because i have SO MANY THOUGHTS about the potential history between these two characters, and am fascinated by their dynamic, whatever the show wants from me. also, i have taken lots of liberties with their history/canonically fairly nonsensical timeline. 
> 
> for caroline. like most things i write, this is not exactly what i wanted it to be going in, but we both know if i continue to agonize about it, i will just never finish it, and since it's for your birthday, i'd really like to finish it! i hope there are things you like about it. also, i love you.
> 
> (title from harry styles' "falling," which was 1/4 songs i listened to on repeat while writing this.)

Nat’s not exactly sure what to think when she walks into her suite’s bathroom on the fourth day of class and finds all of her toiletries rearranged.  
  
She’s somehow even less sure when she investigates the rest of her suitemates’ toiletries and discovers they, too, have been similarly tidied—bottles are sorted by what seems to be height combined with frequency of expected use, and toothbrushes have been placed carefully into a holder between the sinks. Still other products haven’t been touched at all.

She doesn’t yet know much about any of her suitemates—she’s met them all, and they’ve all seemed nice enough, but no one would accuse her of being a social butterfly; her own roommate has proven lovely and harmless and, given the current state of the girl’s desk, absolutely out of the running for bathroom culprit. Which leaves four remaining suitemates.

In the end, she doesn’t have to wait long—she’s most of the way through brushing her teeth when the door to one of the adjoining suites opens and two of said suitemates walk in together.

“No way,” the first girl—blonde, long legs, maybe Allison?—is saying, the entire focus of her attention on whatever story it is Gigi’s in the middle of telling.  
  
That name Nat remembers by reflex, but Nat’s pretty sure that’s just the effect Gigi has on the people around her—of the handful of times Nat’s seen her, half of them have involved her practically holding court, surrounded by at least a small group of her peers urging her through one colorful story after the next. (And there’s no denying she’s, like, devastatingly attractive. That doesn’t exactly hurt.)

“I’m not kidding,” Gigi says. “I’ll never look at a raccoon the same way again.”

While the girl who might be Allison turns on the faucet, still laughing, without so much as glancing at Nat, Gigi turns to face her. “Nat, right?” Gigi says. “A few of us were thinking about checking out some stupid frat party tomorrow night to celebrate surviving week one. What do you think?”

“Oh,” Nat says, caught so wildly off-guard that all she can think to say is, “yeah, okay."

“Oh, Gigi, that organizer you got for all of us? Super cute,” Probably-Allison says, hovering at the door a few moments later, like she’s waiting for Gigi to join her. It occurs to Nat then that it’s Gigi who’s made the adjustments—and that Gigi’s also probably the most well-liked person on the whole floor.

Nat’s pretty sure that’s already breaking all the rules. Especially if Hollywood is to be believed.

Instead of following her out, Gigi waves her goodbyes. Lingers.

“Imagine telling her I bought everything at Walmart,” Gigi says, grin bright and a little conspiratorial; Nat finds herself halfway to smiling without even knowing how she got there. “See how she feels about it then.”

“Did you?” Nat asks.

“No,” Gigi admits. “But she wouldn’t have to know that.”

“Do you not like her?”

Gigi shrugs. “It’s kind of hard to be cool when all you do is spend your whole day trying to be cool.”

“You’re the expert,” Nat says.

“I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment or an insult.”

“Oh,” Nat says. “No. I mean, you’re very cool. If you’re trying, I can’t tell.”

“I don’t think I can really feel cool until you go to a shitty frat party with me,” Gigi says.

By the time Gigi leaves, Nat’s noncommittal _maybe_ has somehow become a vow of yes. And only after she’s gone does Nat realize she forgot to ask why her shampoo’s now in a different place than where she left it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Come on, baby, are you even my girlfriend if you’re not here to celebrate my victories? Baby, I just won foosball. _Drunken_ foosball, baby,” Gigi’s saying, feigning a stumble; it’s an altogether exaggerated impression of Ted, but it’s also similar enough to be just this side of unsettling.

“Okay, are you done now?” Nat says, drawing on annoyance she barely feels to sharpen the question in ways she doesn’t mean. It doesn’t help that she’s a hair or two past tipsy herself, that Ted spent the entire night talking up his foosball game, and that Gigi’s smile is so bright and so warm it’s making Nat a little lightheaded.

“You’re dating a foosball professional, baby,” Gigi says, voice still lowered in an imitation of Ted’s register; she drops onto the bed beside Nat and slings an arm around her shoulders. “How many girls can say that?”

“You need to work harder on your monotone,” Nat says, raising an eyebrow. “That was way too expressive for him.”

“Hey, Nat,” Gigi says, implementing Nat’s advice to exaggerated effect. “I just think you’re, like, a total babe.”

“Much better,” she confirms dryly. “Diction could use some work.” (She doesn’t quite hide her smile.)

“God, Nat,” Gigi says, shifting to lean her head against Nat’s shoulder, wrap an arm around her waist; together they’re directly at Ted’s jacket, slung over Nat’s desk chair, “that dumbass had better be amazing in bed.”

Nat feels herself flush—not because she’s embarrassed about sex, or about the topic of sex, or about having sex, but—

“He doesn’t fucking deserve you,” Gigi goes on, before Nat can answer, each word a warm exhale against her neck that she probably shouldn’t be able to feel skittering down to the tips of her fingers. It occurs to Nat very suddenly that she might need to reassess how drunk she actually is. “You know that, right?”

“He really does like you,” Nat says, gently sliding her fingers through the ends of Gigi’s hair, on instinct.

“Of course,” Gigi says. “That’s common fucking sense.” She shifts, noses her way up the side of Nat’s neck, follows the curve of her jawline, nips lightly at her ear. “I knew my foosball playing turned you on,” she adds, dipping back into Ted’s register.

She wonders if this is how Ted wishes watching him play foosball would make her feel: like her breath can’t quite catch up to the frantic, uneven stammering of her heart, like she’s half an uneven heartbeat from crawling out of her own skin, like if she opens her mouth she might not recognize the sound of her own voice.

(She wonders if this is how Ted thinks she’s felt when she’s looked at him, ever.)

Nat’s drunk enough to catalog her reactions like something apart, like a series of things happening to her—effect without cause or consequence. “I think I’m very drunk,” she hears herself say aloud.

It’s Gigi, still far less than sober herself, who—after a few tries—slides off Nat’s boots, and then her own. It’s Gigi who pulls back the covers and tucks them both in, and Gigi who gathers up the wherewithal to fetch them as big a glass of water as she can manage.

And it’s not until Ted arrives at Nat’s doorstep the next day, in search of his favorite jacket – and, presumably, his girlfriend – that she realizes it’s vanished from her chair overnight.

(That very same morning, Nat discovers a small, potted succulent, resting in the windowsill beside her desk.)

Three days later, Ted finds his jacket balled up in his hamper, appearing—and smelling—distinctly as if it had been used as a rag in a very, very dirty bathroom floor situation involving very, very drunk partygoers.

She’s not exactly lying when she says she can’t explain it. The _how_ eludes her completely. She never says she can’t explain the _who_.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
At first, Nat thinks it must be a failure of memory – after all, though she’s prone to recalling almost reflexively over which chair she last threw her warmest sweater, or on which table she last set her favorite mug, it’s only been three weeks since Olive caught her halfway to putting the keys in the freezer. In comparison, this barely even seems like an oversight – that the flower jar on the living room table is different from the one she remembers, and shifted a little more toward the table’s center than she expects.

And even if Nat’s right, there are three other people in the house—it’s just as likely that Olive or Eli mistakenly knocked the jar over, which left Alice to transfer the flowers to a new one, incidentally moving it in the process.

So it’s not until she finds freshly cut flower stems in the trash, not until she realizes the new jar is shorter than the last and so perfectly suited to accommodate this new length, that she knows the culprit with absolute certainty.

(“Gigi,” she said, four weeks ago, stopping her ex-wife in the doorway. The kids had already run down the hallway to their rooms, vowing to finish homework; there was only Nat, standing in the kitchen, wondering for the eighth day in a row if she shouldn’t just do it.

(She’d asked Alice. Alice had agreed immediately—frustratingly immediately—with a, “Just remind her we’ve got a strict customs ban on hammers.”)

Gigi took a step back inside. “What is it?” she said, and Nat almost didn’t do it.

In fact, right up until she took a breath, closed the distance between them, and dropped the key into Gigi’s palm, she had been very sure she wasn’t going to do it at all. “Here,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“What’s this?” Gigi asked, because Gigi has never let anything be easy.

Nat just offered her a look, a little sharp—like maybe that would be enough to steady the rising panic in her chest, the wild churning of her stomach. “It’s a key. You’ll usually find they open doors.”

“Hilarious,” Gigi said, continuing to look at her.

“It’s the house key,” Nat said, because maybe it would make her look somewhere else. Like maybe it would make her leave, and never look at Nat ever again, not until she stopped remembering how they’d picked up the keys to their new place together, how they’d lit candles on the first night, and sat together in the bare living room, and— “It doesn’t make sense for you not to have one. If there’s ever an emergency—if something ever comes up—there’s no reason you shouldn’t have one.”

“Okay,” Gigi said. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yes,” she huffed out, even though it was obvious that was exactly the thing Gigi wanted—just to hear her say it. Maybe like a concession. “It’s what I want. That’s why I’m doing it.”

“Okay,” Gigi said, curling her fingers around the key, and looking gently at Nat in a way still so unsettlingly familiar it made her want to take it all back—although which _it_ she wanted to take back was, in that moment, a question she might not have been able to answer.

“Okay,” Nat said.)

There’s a single person with both the means and the history—although when Nat suggested the key was for emergencies, she hadn’t been counting flower trimming among them.

She grapples with several different emotions before she settles firmly on indignation—that Gigi would lay claim, however subtle, to a house that does not belong to her, to a life that does not belong to her, knowing that Nat would notice. Knowing that she’s the _reason_ that Nat would notice, that a person could not spend years and years and years of a life so entwined with Gigi’s without adopting a few of her observations along the way.

Nat resolves to confront Gigi directly.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The thing she feels when she finds the unexpected mug of tea on the counter – still warm enough to edge out the chill of a surprisingly crisp L.A. evening – overtakes her so abruptly, and so thoroughly, that it’s clear in a single moment how long she’s been desperately staving it off. How many times righteous anger—wrapped neatly around a mess of betrayal and heartbreak and longing—has kept her safe from it, but only just. How long she’s been trying to outpace it, how often she has pretended herself into freedom, only to find it has taken its time, followed her footsteps, carefully there, carefully waiting. Finding her at some ending she should have known inevitable—finding her too tired to feel, for a single moment, anything else.

It takes up residence in her chest, warm before she takes a sip, warm before she touches the rim of the mug—it’s quiet, and tender, and so distinctly overwhelming that it’s all Nat can do to swallow around it, where it lodges in her throat.

It’s the blue mug—the Friday mug, the one Gigi used to give her with a splash of something extra after a long, long week. But there’s nothing extra here: there’s just the gentle warmth of a welcome home from someone who talked Nat through her entire evening commute, made Nat tea, persuaded their kids to work on math, and left what could only have been minutes before Nat turned her key in the front door so the house would be her own.

Because tonight turned a quick call about scheduling into a forty-minute conversation all the way home—about the most annoying people they’ve had in their lives, about the stupid things they’ve read in emails lately, about Olive’s perfect score on her latest math test, about nothing.

She breathes in the smell of the tea, and thinks of Gigi; she turns to the sink, nearly entirely emptied from what she left behind this morning, and thinks of Gigi; she spots the recently refilled fruit basket, and thinks of Gigi.

There is Gigi in the kids’ shoes lined up beside the door, and there is Gigi in the song she can hear Eli singing along to from his room; the house is her own, and it is not. She is alone in the kitchen, and she is not.

Nat isn’t stupid: a friendship rekindled with the girl she fell in love with barely out of her teens—the woman who poured a lifetime’s worth of trust issues over her and lit a match—the mother to her kids, so full of love and compassion and patience it’s always been just a little too hard to look away—the ex-wife who hammered her wedding ring into Nat’s door, like she had any right to betrayal, like that was something she deserved to share—the best friend she ever had—

it’s too dangerous a choice to make.

But tonight she is too tired to be angry, and she has spent too much of the last hour hearing the sound of Gigi’s laugh, and this thing—this warm, soft, patient thing, blanketing her chest, settling inside her rib cage—exhales something dangerously close to relief.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Um, Nat?” she hears from behind her, as the light comes on above her head. “You doing some midnight redecorating, or is this, like, one of those late-onset sleepwalking conditions?” Alice starts snapping at her, in what Nat can only assume is an effort to startle her into consciousness. “Honey? Honey—”

“Alice,” she says, “I’m not sleepwalking.”

“Are you sure?” Alice says. “’Cause that does kind of sound like something a sleepwalker would say.” She squints in the direction of the picture on the wall, the one now skewed wildly off center, tilted so absurdly far to the right that it could easily be the result of an earthquake. The one she’d been handling when Alice found her.

Had she not been interrupted, it would have more closely matched the one to its left—noticeably tilted, but probably only if you were looking. But this—this is impossible not to notice.

“Is there a new Instagram craze I don’t know about?” Alice continues. “‘Interior decorate like your house is a boat in the middle of some kind of Noah’s ark, hand of god, end of all life as we know it type storm’?”

“You know me,” Nat says, wryly. “The cutting edge of every social media trend.”

It’s not until they’re both back in bed, not until enough long moments of quiet have passed between them, that Alice says, “The Noah’s ark chic—it’s a Gigi thing, isn’t it?”

Nat’s not looking at her when she says it, and she continues to stare at the ceiling when she feels Alice shift her weight on the bed. When she feels Alice turn towards her.

Finally, Nat nods—slowly, so imperceptibly she can’t even be sure that Alice will see. “I made a promise to you,” she says, her exhale only a little shaky. “I want you to know I’d never break that.”

“Talk to me, Nat,” Alice says. “If you have regrets—”

“I don’t,” Nat insists, fervently, finally meeting Alice’s eyes. “I don’t regret anything about you.”

There are things she’s left unsaid: the way Gigi had looked at her—not like before, not like their first ending, desperate and furious and terrified, spinning wildly into free fall; this time was quiet, gentle, agonized by a loss she’d already accepted as fact; this time she’d asked only one question—if a life with Alice would make her happier.

There are things she doesn’t know how to say: that between a beautiful place utterly decimated, ruined beyond recognition, its only sign of a better tomorrow a tiny sprout hardly poking its way through the ground, and a vast garden, carefully tended to, teeming with fruit-bearing trees, there’s no choice at all.

(Never mind the promise she has made to the garden, to return every day with water, to chase away the creatures that might bring it harm.)

“She used to rearrange things sometimes,” Nat says, “in our house.” “Our house” is slippery; “our house” is past and present tense both; “our house” belongs to the best friend she loved, with naïve and unshakeable certainty, nearly all of her adult life; “our house” belongs to the woman she loves now, who held her close and made her laugh while she slowly and clumsily strung enough pieces of her heart back together to be in love with someone else.

But it’s the same house, and it’s the same heart, and in spite of all the lines Nat’s drawn to separate then from now, there has been nothing like the last few months to prove all it took to cross a line was a single step.

“Huh?” Alice says. “What, like some kind of poltergeist?”

“A poltergeist that spends its time moving vases a few inches, and sometimes…washing a mug or two,” Nat says. “Probably not horror movie material.” She pauses, adds, “And then the closet, but that was only when she was actually—well, when she was kind of…”

“Living here,” Alice supplies.

“She hasn’t, um – she hasn’t changed anything,” Nat says. “Not since…since we—since I—” She swallows around all the things she doesn’t know how to articulate. The things that surge wildly across her line, carrying past to present and present to past in such a rush as to make the two entirely indistinguishable. “Not since it ended,” she settles on, keeping blame safely unassigned.

“You miss her,” Alice says.

“Alice,” Nat says, like an exhale—a rush of frustration she’s been holding tight inside her chest, for fear that one wrong move might dislodge the careful equilibrium they’ve begun to rebuild. “You told me everything was fine before. You told me so many times. And then you wouldn’t even let me—you wouldn’t even stay still long enough to _listen_.”

“Nat,” Alice starts.

“It’s not that everything had to keep being fine,” Nat continues. “I get that things change. Just because you say you’re fine once doesn’t mean you have to be fine forever. And I’m not saying…I’m not saying I did everything right. I know I didn’t _._ I made so many mistakes.” Her inhale is shaky; she isn’t prepared for it to sound so loud, but in the quiet darkness of their room, it’s all she can hear. “But I _knew_ I would. She’s my ex-wife. She was my best friend. We had kids together. She cheated on me. I’ve spent more of my adult life in love with her than not in love with her. I didn’t have a road map, Alice. And all anyone else kept saying was that it was fine, they were fine, everything was going to be _fine_.”

Alice is quiet, now, her expression startlingly unreadable—subtlety has never been her defining trait. “I never wanted to hurt you,” Nat continues. “I _hate_ that I hurt you. But I’m feeling—I guess I’m feeling scared. I’m feeling scared that if I say the wrong thing, you’ll walk away again.”

For long, long moments there is nothing but silence; it’s Nat who breaks, says, “Alice? Can you please say something?”

“Do you wish you’d chosen her instead?” Alice asks.

“No,” Nat says. “That’s not at all what I’m saying.”

“Are you still in love with her?” Alice asks, and it feels nothing like a thoroughly drunken night out at a bar with her girlfriend, insistently and delightedly asking if she still thought about fucking her ex-wife, but it’s the thing Nat thinks about, anyway.

“You’re not hearing me,” Nat says. “I’m not asking to change our relationship. I just want to know that you’ll…”

“I’m not asking if you want to change our relationship, Nat. I’m not asking if you want to be with me, or if you’re in love with me. I’m asking if you’re still in love with her.”

“I don’t think it’s a fair question,” Nat says. Not from Alice, who had walked her hand-in-hand down a path that ended in Gigi and then, abruptly, vanished. Because Nat was doing her best to find her way through all of the trees and all of the underbrush that might lead her to Alice, but she needed time. Time, and maybe a machete. “I chose you. Just you.”

“I know,” Alice says, gently; finally, she reaches a hand forward to cup Nat’s cheek, and Nat breathes slowly out. “I know you did. Actually, so do a few hundred million of our closest friends.”

But the answer exists like that, between them, unsaid and perfectly clear.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Alice?” Nat says, closing the door behind her—she hadn’t expected Alice to be home yet, hadn’t seen her car in the driveway, but if the noises in the kitchen are anything to go by, clearly someone must be home. “Do we have that last bottle of wine in the cabinet still, because—”

“Hi,” calls a voice from the kitchen—a voice Nat’s been able to recognize from a single word for nearly two decades. “Just me.”

“Gigi? What are you doing here? Are the kids okay?”

“They’re fine,” Gigi says. “Everything’s fine. I’m making tea.”

Nat drops her bag onto a dining room chair, hovers at the edge of the kitchen, doesn’t stop Gigi from grabbing the bottle opener out of exactly the drawer she knew to find it and uncorking their last bottle of wine. “I think there are still other places to find tea,” she says. That doesn’t keep her from accepting the wine glass Gigi pours.

“A few,” Gigi says, smile wide and just mischievous enough that it reminds her for a single moment of what it felt like to be nineteen, holding hands with her best friend in a bar that should have never let them in, watching her try—and choke violently on—a shot of tequila no one should have given her. “Why the wine?”

“Just a long day,” Nat says.

“Tell me you’re not still seeing Trevor,” Gigi says, pouring herself a glass like that’s something she can just do. (And maybe it is.)

It’s a fake name, of course—Gigi’s invention, simply because she thought it fit. (Nat couldn’t disagree.) “Oh, God, Trevor,” Nat says. “No, he moved halfway across the country.”

“And he didn’t suggest Skype sessions?”

“Oh, he definitely did,” Nat says. “Too bad it’s outside my policy.”

Gigi snorts out a half laugh, enough history between them to know that’s a new and very specific development. “To Trevor,” she says, lifting her glass, and they clink gently together.

“What are you doing here, Gigi?” Nat says.

“Alice asked me to come,” she says, which is just about the last thing Nat could have imagined coming out of her mouth, short of _zombies have taken over the rest of the world and I came to warn you_ , although even that perhaps seems reasonable in the face of—

“Are you joking?”

Gigi gives her a strange look. “I’m funnier than that,” she says. And then, “She called me last night and asked me to come over. And also to straighten all the pictures on the wall? I’m not sure what that was about, but I did it.”

The flush crawls up Nat’s neck, warms her cheeks; she swallows around her embarrassment, wonders suddenly what Alice had meant. If she had meant for this—to humiliate her, to face her with the consequences of stupid decisions made in a haze of midnight desperation, when all she could think about was a color-coded closet they’d left mostly intact, the burgundy only just beginning to bleed into navy—

But Alice, even at her pettiest, even when she’d been her angriest, has never sought Nat’s humiliation. And yet, what other explanation is there? What else but the unthinkable, the unimaginable? “Why would she ask you that?” Nat bites out, sharply, as if Gigi deserves to answer for it.

Gigi’s eyebrows raise, but all she says is, “I don’t know. She didn’t explain.”

“Then why would you come here at all?” Nat asks. “Why would you answer a request to, what, decorate a home that isn’t even yours? What are you _doing_ here?”

“I miss you,” Gigi says, honest in three simple words the way Nat hasn’t been in weeks—weeks spent giving answers always just shy of what she means.

“ _You’re_ avoiding _me_ , Gigi,” Nat says. “You’re going out of your way to drop the kids off when you know I’m out. You barely say two words to me when I answer the door. You—” She nearly manages to choke it down, then doesn’t. “—you haven’t made any changes to our house in weeks.”

 _Our house._ Slippery as ever. Past-present-future.

“Wait, what?” Gigi says, startling. “What do you mean, changes?”

“You know what I mean,” Nat says, finishing off her glass. “Putting away the glasses by the sink. Organizing the mugs into rows. Straightening the paintings. The same things you’ve always done. The things you kept doing, even though the house doesn’t belong to you. Even though the keys were supposed to be for emergencies, or picking up the kids, not— _this_.”

“You never said anything,” Gigi says, slowly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why did you keep doing it?”

“I wanted you to notice,” Gigi says, again so breathtakingly forthright she feels it unspool something inside her chest, feels something give. “I didn’t want you to forget. I didn’t know what I’d do if you forgot.”

“And now?” Nat says.

“I’m trying,” Gigi admits. “I’m trying to not be so selfish. I want it to be easy for you. I don’t want to make it hard.”

“You’re trying to make it easy for me?” Nat says. “I can’t even count the number of times you showed up at my house in the middle of the night screaming for me to let you in after we broke up. Wait, no—after I realized you’d been fucking one of our friends, regularly, and lying to me the whole time. And this time you’re trying to make it easy? For _me_? Why should it be easy for me?”

“Love,” Gigi says, and Nat realizes quite suddenly that the distance between them has vanished almost entirely; Gigi’s inches from her, carefully touching her nowhere, “you’re my family. Our kids are my family. _This time_ , I don’t think it’ll all be gone tomorrow. I think it’ll always be here.”

“And that’s enough for you?” Nat demands. “Saying hi when you pick up the kids? Waving from a few stands away at Olive’s soccer games?”

“What do you want me to say, Nat? No, it’s not enough. I spent years married to the love of my life, and then I fucked that up, how I always do. How I always _did_. That’s not who I want to be anymore,” she says, and Nat can’t look away. “And not enough is still better than nothing.”

“It’s too late for us,” Nat says, an echo of the very decision she made the moment she realized Gigi had been fucking Mona. A decision she made when she threw Gigi out, changed all the locks, erased every voicemail, blocked Gigi’s number. No looking back, no turning around—Nat could mourn, but she could not reverse time, and some things could never be undone.

Now, here, filling the few inches that separate them, it sounds more like grasping at straws than the certainty of a stable foundation—more like a desperate, hollow attempt at rationalizing a future without the one person who has most defined how it will look.

Gigi takes her in, slowly—Nat watches her follow the outline of her jaw, the edge of her chin, the shape of her nose, until it becomes too excruciating, the weight of it too unbearable: to see Gigi see her, the years broken open between them, a college student lost to panic the night before her language development final, Gigi’s hand in hers, anchoring Nat, mother to their dangerously sick son, clinging to each other in the dying hours of their marriage.

“Do you believe that?” Gigi asks, and Nat can’t say yes, but doesn’t know how to say no.

“I think you should go,” Nat says, finally. She calls Alice the moment after she hears Gigi close the door behind her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Absolutely not,” Nat says, when Gigi reaches for the driver’s side door. “ _Absolutely_ not.”  
  
“It’s my car,” Gigi points out.  
  
“Yeah,” Nat says, adding, like she’s simply listing another observation, “it’s a really nice car.” She hands Gigi the tray of snacks they both put together, holds out her hand with a pointed look. “You know my car’s getting worked on. You also know that when you drove us to Olive’s swim meet last week, you almost got us into four separate accidents.”  
  
“That’s such an exaggeration,” Gigi says, but hands Nat the keys anyway. “I barely even had to brake.”  
  
“And I still have whiplash from how much you ‘didn’t have to brake,’” Nat says, sliding into the driver’s seat just a little triumphantly.  
  
“Hey!” Alice calls, catching them on the way out, throwing her arms around both of them. “You two crazy kids have fun, okay?”  
  
Eli emerges from the house right behind her, prompting her to add, “Not that it’ll compare to the awesome time me and this guy are gonna have. Epic movie marathon, right?”  
  
“Do we still have Reese’s?” he asks, suddenly looking mildly interested.  
  
“Come on, kid, really?” she says, in a stage whisper. “In front of your _moms_? Have I taught you nothing at all?”  
  
After they all say their goodbyes, Alice ushers him back into the house with her, offers Gigi and Nat an exaggerated thumbs-up behind his back before they disappear.

“I think they might even have fun,” Nat says.

“Eli asked for her last night,” Gigi points out, as she climbs into the passenger seat. “He wouldn’t go to sleep until he got goodnights from ‘everyone’.”

“Wow,” Nat says. “I don’t think he’s ever not wanted to go to sleep that bad before.”

Nat adjusts the rearview mirror, still hears the smile in Gigi’s voice without ever having to look when she says, “She’s getting better at talking to them.”

Nat nods her agreement, shifts the seat back just a couple inches to accommodate what little height Nat has over Gigi, like a reflex. Something else she never quite managed to unlearn. “It doesn’t hurt that having Alice around doesn’t mean not having you around anymore,” Nat points out.

“ _I_ could have told you that months ago,” Gigi says.

By the time they arrive in the parking lot—safely, comfortably, and without honking even one single time—there are still twenty minutes before they’re expected to make an appearance. Mrs. Ronson’s already texted to say she and Olive made it (sleepovers have proven an unexpected gift, especially when hosted by other people), so Nat’s in no particular rush as she unbuckles her seatbelt, swings open the door—

“I have an idea,” Gigi says, reaching all the way across her to grab for the handle and slam it closed. Which leaves her already halfway in Nat’s lap by the time she starts kissing her, open-mouthed and messy in a way that Nat already knows has only one kind of ending.

Or, well, one umbrella of ending, at least, with lots of subsets of endings underneath it.

“If any of the swim moms see this, they’ll never let us forget it,” Nat points out, though she tilts her chin up the moment Gigi leans down, drags her tongue from Nat’s collarbone to the underside of her jaw, leaves a biting kiss behind. “Olive’s gay throuple moms fucking in the parking lot like fifteen-year-olds without their own bed,” Nat’s saying, though she nearly doesn’t see it through to the end; it’s sheer force of will that she faces down the trembling of her own voice, breathes the last words on an exhale.

“I get to fuck you in our bed all the time,” Gigi says. “I haven’t fucked you in my car.”

“Oh, are you saying I’m easy?” Nat says, into her mouth, her attention focused on undoing one of Gigi’s buttons—the biggest obstacle to which is the significant lack of space they’re both working with. Nice car or not, it’s still definitely a car.

“I’m saying you showed up to my car looking really fucking sexy, love,” Gigi says, reaching to push the seat back and sending them both tumbling a little unexpectedly; the head rest is digging into Nat’s spine and her hand is wrapped around Gigi’s neck, and Gigi’s hair is everywhere, and Nat’s hair is everywhere, and Gigi breathes a laugh into her ear that should bring them both back to reality, except that it doesn’t.

It’s something Gigi’s been doing a lot, recently—on any errand the two of them run, during half the events they attend together: making a point of how much she wants Nat. Even if that point is made by way of making out against Lowe’s’ many shelves of electrical cables.

“This felt a lot different when I was twenty-two,” Nat says, playing at pragmatism even as she reaches out to bring Gigi’s face back to hers, leans up to kiss her several shades too earnest to be mistaken for anything but want laid bare.

It’s true and it’s not: maneuvering clumsily to the back seat takes twice as long as it did at twenty-two; the back door presses into the back of her neck, promising an ache until well into tomorrow; the desperate tumbling of her heart inside her chest has nothing to do with the newness of this moment, the uncertainty of tomorrow, the revelation of turning the handle of a door she’d never expected to find; and there’s the car, at least twice as comfortable as either of them could have once afforded.

It’s true and it’s not: all these years later, and Nat is still left with the eager, breathless stumbling of her heart—and maybe it is new again, possibility reignited behind a door she’d thought she sealed, padlocked, left miles and miles behind her, only to realize she’d been standing in the doorway all the time, and the only obstacle between her and what lay beyond was a doorknob. But behind every heartbeat is the familiarity, in even greater measure; there’s nothing unexpected about the way Gigi shifts down the length of her body, settles between her legs, looks up to meet her eyes as she presses a slow, lingering kiss to her inner thigh. When Gigi returns to suck what is sure to be a bruise in the same place, it isn’t the newness of it that has Nat grappling for the headrest, gripping tight to the cool metal she finds; after all, they have half a lifetime behind them of knowing how easily Nat bruises.

And she’d recognize Gigi’s expression, once she shifts Nat’s dress up and over her hips, anywhere: deeply, deeply smug. 

(Gigi’s hasty battle with the passenger seat to shift it as far forward as it will go, to accommodate her on the floor, is a little more like being twenty-two.)

Nat loses time, for a while: when she becomes aware of herself again, she finds she has one leg hooked partially around Gigi, the other pressed against the back seat; she hears the echo of eager, desperate noises she hadn’t realized were her own. And it’s only a surge of anxiety that has her reaching for Gigi’s arm, pulling her wrist close enough to read—

To read—

“Oh my god,” she mumbles instead, halfway to a moan, distracted again by the drag of Gigi’s tongue, distracted by a woman too familiar by half with the range of effects she can have on Nat, and how best to achieve each—

It takes her at least three more tries, but finally she reads the hands on Gigi’s watch: “Okay, six minutes,” she somehow manages to breathe. “Six minutes.”

And Gigi just brushes her thumb gently along Nat’s thigh, an acknowledgement of the one thing they’ve always had in common, even at their very worst, even when Gigi was bringing hammers to Nat’s door, even when Nat spent weeks refusing to exchange a single word with her but for the items on their shared schedule: wanting the very most for their kids.

When Gigi considerately leads her over the edge in a little over a minute from then—an edge that has Nat covering her mouth with her own hand, biting down on her palm as she remembers in just enough time there are parts of her life she’d prefer to keep from this parking lot—Nat breathes, “Get up here,” gestures her onto the seat above her. Counts on the fact that she knows Gigi well enough to know that watching Nat murmur her name like a prayer has her halfway there already.

The angle’s a mess, and Nat’s still a little too gone to be anything but sloppy, but when she curls her fingers inside her, Gigi swears into her neck—grips the handle of the door behind them between ragged breaths.

There are thirty seconds left to them by the time Gigi comes, and Nat uses half of that to bring Gigi’s mouth down to hers, warm and messy and so, so easy. Nat watches Gigi reach for her hand, slide Nat’s fingers slowly, slowly, slowly into her mouth; she feels the scrape of Gigi’s teeth, the swirl of her tongue, as she pulls them out, thinks for a moment that maybe she is twenty-two again, after all, falling in love with a best friend who might just kill her.

“Time to go,” Gigi says, and they’re parents again—Gigi reaches into Nat’s bag, hands her the brush she knows she’ll find, as she begins to redo the buttons of her own shirt.

Nat’s still brushing her hair back into place as Gigi smooths out Nat’s dress, and it’s embarrassing that it takes her another moment to ask, “Where are my—”

She doesn’t even need to finish: between Gigi’s teeth—and her bright, bright grin—are Nat’s underwear, which she carefully deposits into Nat’s open hand. She follows the path of Nat’s hands as she shifts to pull them back on: presses a gentle kiss to Nat’s calf, to the underside of her knee, slides her tongue one last time over the mark she’s left on Nat’s thigh. When Nat breathes out a whimper, Gigi leans up to kiss it from her, pulling her dress back into place as she does.

“Come on,” Nat says. “We are not gonna let _Addison Stevens_ beat us this time.”

“Not a fucking chance,” Gigi agrees.

They don’t: by the time they’re inside, serving up snacks, they’ve still come in ahead of at least three other parents.

“Besides, our snacks were way better,” Gigi whispers to Nat as they settle into the front row, waiting to cheer on their brilliant, talented, incredible daughter.

“Obviously,” Nat says.

 _She beat her best time!_ Nat texts Alice nearly an hour later, after she and Gigi have finished screaming themselves hoarse.

 _Yay! It’s so much more fun when I don’t have to be there!!!_ Alice texts back, attaching a picture of herself and Eli, lying on the couch watching something that Nat thinks looks suspiciously like _High School Musical_. When she offers it to Gigi to read, Gigi grabs for the phone, smiling wide for a selfie that she changes at the last moment, turning instead to pull Nat into a kiss.

“Trust me,” Gigi says. Because Nat still sometimes _worries_ , still feels the flicker of uncertainty, catching too often into a wildfire shaped like fear, that any of this will ever last. The fact that it shouldn’t work, not on paper, means Nat’s left constantly waiting for that revelation to occur to someone else (again). Like they’re cartoon characters suspended over the edge of the cliff, and all it will take is someone, inevitably, looking down. One wrong move. “Trust me, Nat,” Gigi says, again, and Nat thinks she just might.

When Alice responds to the selfie, it’s to say: _So how about the kids’ 7 pm bedtime tonight, am I right?_

“Tell her maybe if she drugs them,” Gigi says.

“I can’t,” Nat says. “She’d probably consider it.”

And Gigi laughs, and kisses her, and doesn’t disagree, and Nat thinks maybe she can spend a long, long time never looking down.


End file.
